‘The world is going away. It does that here, Mother. A great heat and whiteness descends. If you remain out in it, as once I did, you are blinded and burned. We must seek shelter from it now. It may be hard to believe, but it becomes much worse than this. This is only the beginning, what they call “dawn.”’
‘Tavern man! Where can we go?’ Vandien turned to that piteous plea. Chess had hidden his face in his mother’s gown, and the woman had thrown her arm across her eyes. They wilted like daffodils in a drought.
‘You must let them through!’ Vandien cried, understanding only vaguely what was happening. But the Gate that had been before them a moment ago now eluded him, first winking wide, then showing only as a narrow rift in the wall. It hid in the growing light. He glimpsed the Keeper’s toothless grin. As Vandien sprang forward angrily to seize the mocking creature, his outstretched hands met a forgiving resistance, as if he pressed against the air bladder in a fish. He pushed against it, ignoring a stinging tingle like nettles. So far would his hands go, and no farther. The Keeper’s laughter did not reach their ears, but Vandien had a glimpse of his mirth as he battled with the evasive Gate.
Behind him he heard cries as the first rays of sunlight touched the city. At the same time, his fist scraped the old stone of the city walls. He pulled back his hands and stared at the coarse stone of the solid wall before him. Gate and Keeper were gone like mist in the sunlight. He spent a few futile seconds pushing against this and that stone of the wall, seeking some hidden catch or loose stone. The carved figures smiled down at him condescendingly. He pressed his hands against the wall, weaving his hand from side to side like a blind thing. The Gate would glimmer for an instant, and be gone before he could see it. Vandien cursed, clawing mindlessly at the stone. Then he felt a fumbling at his cloak.
The woman had sunk to her knees, her face huddled across her crossed arms. Chess had crept across to him, to tug at him piteously. He crouched, whimpering wordlessly before Vandien. The morning sun colored his hair between blond and grey. It fell forward over his bowed shoulders, baring a slender neck as brown as wild honey. Vandien looked at the solid wall and shook his head in bewilderment. His brain rattled sharply inside his skull; the first stabs of an Alys-inspired headache jabbed him.
He eased himself down to untangle Chess from his cloak. Any sudden movement or violent activity would trigger a truly memorable headache. He knew he should turn his efforts to finding Ki. But he couldn’t just leave these two here. ‘We’ll go to the next Gate and circle around,’ he promised them.
As he unhooked each of Chess’s small hands, they fell unresisting to the dusty street. He continued to whimper as if he wished to cling to Vandien but found the effort beyond his strength. His high-pitched keening and the deeper sobs of his mother pierced Vandien’s brain like arrows. ‘What has happened to the Gate? Will they open it again?’ he asked them gently. There was only the rising and falling of the boy’s wailing as a reply. Vandien felt needles at the back of his eyeballs. ‘Chess, stop that, please. I can’t help you if you won’t talk to me.’
More keening. Vandien reached for the thin shoulders, repressed just in time a violent urge to shake the child into silence. He looked down in pain and consternation at the small head bowed before him. His eyes widened and his own throbbing head was forgotten.
Small watery pink blisters were rising on the back of his exposed neck, popping up even as Vandien watched. His belly tightened and he started to back away from whatever unsuspected disease this was. Where the hair parted on the boy’s skull, more blisters were popping up in a neat row like seedlings after a rain. Chess’s eyes were screwed tight shut in pain as he raised his face to Vandien. The skin of his small brown face was pure still, but as soon as the morning sunlight touched it, the blisters began to swell.
‘The light! The hot light!’ Vandien looked at the mother struggling to rise. ‘How can it be endured? We shall die here!’
She lifted her once proud head and staggered a few steps closer to Vandien. Her eyes were squinted to slits. He saw the blisters rise on her nose and high cheeks as she groped toward him. She fell to her knees, her hands seeking blindly before her. The green of her airy garments began to brown and crumple in the morning light like leaves seared in a desert wind. Pink blisters popped on her exposed hands and arms.
He did not understand why, but he comprehended the need. With a sudden movement that brought demons to dance in his skull, he whipped the cloak from his own back and floated it down over the woman. It covered most of her, and as soon as she sensed its protection she drew her arms and legs neath its shelter. ‘Chess!’ Her agonized moan came from beneath the garment.
The child at his feet whimpered in reply but didn’t move. The brown ragged garment from the inn covered most of his body. He had the sense to crouch with his arms and legs drawn up beneath him and his face averted from the sky. The cloak would not cover both of them. Vandien was tugging off his shirt when he heard the scuff of a footstep behind him.
He twirled, wincing at the pain this cost him. A portly man, the worse for his night’s revelry, regarded the group with a carefully uncurious eye. As Vandien rounded on him, he became even more disinterested; his careful walk proclaimed that the woman huddled under the cloak and the child that whimpered and scrabbled at Vandien were invisible. A true city dweller, he gave them only an oblique glance that never reached Vandien’s eyes.
Vandien knew the courtesy of the city forbade him to look at the stranger or express any need, but his splitting headache and the peril of the young boy before him banished politeness. He dragged himself free of Chess, to clutch at the man’s sleeve. ‘I need your cloak, man! The child is burning up!’
The man opened his bloodshot eyes a trifle wider. He belched, and pulled his arm free of Vandien’s frantic grip, even though the tug nearly cost him his balance. He staggered a few steps sideways, drew himself up gravely, and shot Vandien a haughty and disdainful look. But as he shrugged his cloak back even about himself, his eyes took in the blisters on the child’s exposed arms. With a speed surprising in one so large, he ripped the cloak from his back and dashed it down into the street.
‘My thanks for your mercies.’ Vandien stooped to take up the cloak.
The man’s mouth opened wider than Vandien supposed it could. His eyes were distended and suddenly sober. ‘Pox!’ The word blared from his mouth like a blast from a hunting horn. ‘Pox bringers!’ he screeched again.
Vandien flung the cloak about Chess as aroused citizens began to stir. A door slammed somewhere. Heads began to pop out of doors in the side street. A young woman stepped from a door near the corner. She halted at the sight of Vandien with the bundled child in his arms and the body huddled under a cloak beside him.
‘Pox bringers!’ She took up the cry lustily and the man made it a chorus. Stooping to the street, she grabbed a loose stone. Vandien flung up his arm to shield his face, but the fist-sized rock bounced instead off the woman. It brought a sharper cry from under the cloak. The streets were filling with people awakened by the cries of ‘Pox bringers!’ Head and heart pounding, Vandien stooped beneath his burden of the child to seize the mother by her arm and drag her erect. The cloak fell away from her face as she came up; the stone throwing woman gave a shriek of horror. The blisters were rupturing. A watery flow shone on the woman’s face and dripped from her chin. Screaming with pain, she dragged the cloak over her face again.
And then they were running, with stones skipping and bouncing past them. Vandien received a solid thunk from one that hit between his shoulders, but no more flew true after that. Mentally, he cursed the gods for his luck, and in the same breath thanked them that his pursuers were city bred and poor in the skills of aiming and throwing.
Chess jolted in his arms as he tried to keep a hand free to guide the woman along. The cloak blinded her and the pain crippled her. Their run was little more than a hurried hobble; they had no chance of outdistancing their pursuers. His rapier was in the wagon with Ki; but he had no hand free to draw it in any case. He had only his belt knife against a fear-crazed crowd.
He glanced back to check their numbers. But though they shook fists